The Secret of the Night by Gaston Leroux (best free ebook reader .txt) 📖

brought here. Those grapes were left by the Marshal, who warned Michael Nikolaievitch and Boris Alexandrovitch to wash them. The grapes disappeared. If Michael is innocent, do you accuse Boris?”

Natacha, who seemed to have suddenly lost all power for defending herself, moaned, begged, railed, seemed dying.

“No, no. Don’t accuse Boris. He has nothing to do with it. Don’t accuse Michael. Don’t accuse anyone so long as you don’t know. But these two are innocent. Believe me. Believe me. Ah, how shall I say it, how shall I persuade you! I am not able to say anything to you. And you have killed Michael. Ah, what have you done, what have you done!”

“We have suppressed a man,” said the icy voice of Koupriane, “who was merely the agent for the base deeds of Nihilism.”

She succeeded in recovering a new energy that in her depths of despair they would have supposed impossible. She shook her fists at Koupriane:

“It is not true, it is not true. These are slanders, infamies! The inventions of the police! Papers devised to incriminate him. There is nothing at all of what you said you found at his house. It is not possible. It is not true.”

“Where are those papers?” demanded the curt voice of Feodor. “Bring them here at once, Koupriane; I wish to see them.”

Koupriane was slightly troubled, and this did not escape Natacha, who cried:

“Yes, yes, let him give us them, let him bring them if he has them. But he hasn’t,” she clamored with a savage joy. “He has nothing. You can see, papa, that he has nothing. He would already have brought them out. He has nothing. I tell you he has nothing. Ah, he has nothing! He has nothing!”

And she threw herself on the floor, weeping, sobbing, “He has nothing, he has nothing!” She seemed to weep for joy.

“Is that true?” demanded Feodor Feodorovitch, with his most somber manner. “Is it true, Koupriane, that you have nothing?”

“It is true, General, that we have found nothing. Everything had already been carried away.”

But Natacha uttered a veritable torrent of glee:

“He has found nothing! Yet he accuses him of being allied with the revolutionaries. Why? Why? Because I let him in? But I, am I a revolutionary? Tell me. Have I sworn to kill papa? I? I? Ah, he doesn’t know what to say. You see for yourself, papa, he is silent. He has lied. He has lied.”

“Why have you made this false statement, Koupriane?”

“Oh, we have suspected Michael for some time, and truly, after what has just happened, we cannot have any doubt.”

“Yes, but you declared you had papers, and you have not. That is abominable procedure, Koupriane,” replied Feodor sternly. “I have heard you condemn such expedients many times.”

“General! We are sure, you hear, we are absolutely sure that the man who tried to poison you yesterday and the man to-day who is dead are one and the same.”

“And what reason have you for being so sure? It is necessary to tell it,” insisted the general, who trembled with distress and impatience.

“Yes, let him tell now.”

“Ask monsieur,” said Koupriane.

They all turned to Rouletabille.

The reporter replied, affecting a coolness that perhaps he did not entirely feel:

“I am able to state to you, as I already have before Monsieur the Prefect of Police, that one, and only one, person has left the traces of his various climbings on the wall and on the balcony.”

“Idiot!” interrupted Natacha, with a passionate disdain for the young man. “And that satisfies you?”

The general roughly seized the reporter’s wrist:

“Listen to me, monsieur. A man came here this night. That concerns only me. No one has any right to be astonished excepting myself. I make it my own affair, an affair between my daughter and me. But you, you have just told us that you are sure that man is an assassin. Then, you see, that calls for something else. Proofs are necessary, and I want the proofs at once. You speak of traces; very well, we will go and examine those traces together. And I wish for your sake, monsieur, that I shall be as convinced by them as you are.”

Rouletabille quietly disengaged his wrist and replied with perfect calm:

“Now, monsieur, I am no longer able to prove anything to you.”

“Why?”

“Because the ladders of the police agents have wiped out all my proofs, monsieur.

“So now there remains for us only your word, only your belief in yourself. And if you are mistaken?”

“He would never admit it, papa,” cried Natacha. “Ah, it is he who deserves the fate Michael Nikolaievitch has met just now. Isn’t it so? Don’t you know it? And that will be your eternal remorse! Isn’t there something that always keeps you from admitting that you are mistaken? You have had an innocent man killed. Now, you know well enough, you know well that I would not have admitted Michael Nikolaievitch here if I had believed he was capable of wishing to poison my father.”

“Mademoiselle,” replied Rouletabille, not lowering his eyes under Natacha’s thunderous regard, “I am sure of that.”

He said it in such a tone that Natacha continued to look at him with incomprehensible anguish in her eyes. Ah, the baffling of those two regards, the mute scene between those two young people, one of whom wished to make himself understood and the other afraid beyond all other things of being thoroughly understood. Natacha murmured:

“How he looks at me! See, he is the demon; yes, yes, the little domovoi, the little domovoi. But look out, poor wretch; you don’t know what you have done.”

She turned brusquely toward Koupriane:

“Where is the body of Michael Nikolaievitch?” said she. “I wish to see it. I must see it.”

Feodor Feodorovitch had fallen, as though asleep, upon a chair. Matrena Petrovna dared not approach him. The giant appeared hurt to the death, disheartened forever. What neither bombs, nor bullets, nor poison had been able to do, the single idea of his daughter’s co-operation in the work of horror plotted about him—or rather the impossibility he faced of understanding Natacha’s attitude, her mysterious conduct, the chaos of her explanations, her insensate cries, her protestations of innocence, her accusations, her menaces, her prayers and all her disorder, the avowed fact of her share in that tragic nocturnal adventure where Michael Nikolaievitch found his death, had knocked over Feodor Feodorovitch like a straw. One instant he sought refuge in some vague hope that Koupriane was less assured than he pretended of the orderly’s guilt. But that, after all, was only a detail of no importance in his eyes. What alone mattered